Archive for July, 2008

As headlines often do, the one on the front page of the latest Chicago Jewish News puts the matter a little too simply: "FEDERAL CASE, The U.S. Court of Appeals Says a Chicago Woman Has No Right to Put a Mezuzah on Her Front Door." 

That would be no right under federal law -- as distinct from state law and Chicago ordinance, which, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals observes, do defend plaintiff Lynne Bloch's mezuzah. And as do the rejiggered rules of the Shoreline Towers Condominium Association, which for a time kept removing Ms. Bloch's mezuzah from her front door. 

If you have no interest in examining legal disputes, stop reading now. I think they can be fascinating, and I think the Jewish News account by managing editor Pauline Dubkin Yearwood does a good job of threading its way through this one, the grabber headline notwithstanding. The central facts are these: Bloch went to federal court in 2006 seeking damages from the Shoreline Towers Condominium Association for the way it treated her mezuzah, and the Seventh Circuit just tossed out her suit. 

These facts are not in dispute: Bloch herself led the committee that in 2001 promulgated what was called the Hallway Rule. The pivotal rule one said this: "Mats, boots, shoes, carts or objects of any sort are prohibited outside Unit entrance doors." Following a 2004 renovation at Shoreline Towers, 6301 N. Sheridan Road, rule one was reinterpreted by the condo board to include things on the door. Which, among other things, meant all mezuzahs.

Because both the state of Illinois and Chicago subsequently acted, and the condo board, under fire, relaxed its rules, the Bloch mezuzah is back on her doorjamb. But Bloch has been after damages, and unless the three-judge Seventh Circuit panel is overruled by the full circuit or the Supreme Court, no jury will ever get to decide if she deserves them.

Judges don't always disagree with each other for fancy philosophical reasons. The Bloch suit strikes me as a case in which judges disagree because one thinks harder about a matter than the other. Here's the Seventh Circuit opinion of July 10, written by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, with Senior Judge William Bauer concurring. It's a brisk six pages long and leans heavily on a Seventh Circuit ruling four years ago in a similar case, Halprin v. Prairie Single Family Homes of Dearborn Park Association. Halprin, Easterbrook explains, held that the federal Fair Housing Act "forbids discrimination in the 'terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling' but does not address discrimination after ownership has changed hands." And although the act might come into play if religious discrimination were so intolerable it amounted to "constructive eviction," [Bloch contended she was bound by Jewish law to display a mezuzah, and if she could not she would have to move] in this case that was not a consideration. 

Because -- "The hallway rule, as adopted in 2001 and as enforced in 2004, is neutral with respect to religion . . ." says Easterbrook. "The association removed secular photos and posters as well as Christmas ornaments, crucifixes, and mezuzot. Generally applicable rules that do not refer to religion differ from discrimination."

Judge Diane Wood's dissent is 17 pages long. She takes the idea of constructive eviction a lot more seriously than Easterbrook does. She disagrees with him about what can be found, or at least teased out of federal law, and about what the Seventh Circuit actually said in Halprin. She keeps in mind that the court isn't being called on to decide whether Bloch should win or lose her suit, but simply whether a jury should be allowed to hear it. And she pauses to examine and regret, in a case in which anti-Semitism is at issue, the assertion in a defense brief that "throughout this matter, Plaintiffs have been trying to get their 'pound of flesh' from Defendants." 

A second Shoreline Towers resident to sue the condo association over the mezuzah ban is Debra Gassman, who's since moved to Israel. Here's a May 15 Hot Type in which I touch on her suit.

Apparently justice took a U-turn in New York City. A video anonymously posted on YouTube catches a New York City police officer body-checking a biker into the curb as last Friday's Critical Mass rally passed through Times Square. According to Newsday, the guy on the bike, Christopher Long, was accused of pedaling into the cop. He was arrested and charged with attempted assault, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. That's not the story the video tells -- and after it surfaced, says Newsday, rookie officer Patrick Pogan was put on modified duty.

Mary Mitchell wrote a puzzling column for the Sunday Sun-Times. Her subject was the appearance of the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at the UNITY conference of minority journalists in McCormick Place. Mitchell wondered what he was doing there, given that Wade was the first foreign head of state UNITY had ever invited to speak, since he's "been accused of unfairly suppressing journalists by locking them up and threatening them." 

And sure enough, during an interview Thursday with a group of journalists he "showed shocking disdain for journalists in his own country," asserting that the "Senegalese press is infiltrated by politics. I am telling you if you do not give them information, they are going to invent it. They insult people. They accuse people when they don't even have any proof."

But what troubled Mitchell more -- she found it "appalling" -- is that Wade's speech Friday was disrupted. Someone shouted, "I want to speak in the name of my people," and was then pummeled.

"Frankly, it was embarrassing that an African head of state was subjected to the chaotic situation," wrote Mitchell, as if the matter came down just to Wade's feelings. She faulted "the security personnel -- including the Chicago Police Department -- [who] should have anticipated trouble," and she pressed on to the extravagant conclusion that the matter "doesn't bode well for the city's Olympic bid."

Did Mitchell, whose knowledge of the incident was sketchy and secondhand, think no visiting head of state had ever before faced a hostile crowd? Here's an account of what happened, posted by the Community Media Workshop, that makes it harder to sympathize with Wade. It identifies the protester as Souleymane Jules Diop, "an exiled Senegalese journalist," and says he "was beaten for several minutes by at least four men who were reportedly bodyguards of President Wade." And here's a video. It's hard to follow, but it does show the presumed bodyguards roaming the room. On the other hand, it makes it clear that "several minutes" is a wild exaggeration. Diop was led out of the room, shirtless, by Chicago police in under a minute.

The problem with Mitchell's column is where it lands. Conceding that Wade's safety "apparently was never threatened," she nevertheless fashions it into a treatise on "the city's ability to guard a foreign head of state" rather than what strikes me as the matter at hand -- the anguish of Senegalese journalists.

I'd had the same reaction a few days earlier reading a column by Mitchell's sportswriting colleague Carol Slezak. Like Mitchell, Slezak didn't appear to understand her own material.  

Slezak was considering the failure of Oscar Pistorius, who runs the 400 meters on artificial legs, to make South Africa's Olympics team. "Talk about ruining what should have been a heartwarming story," she wrote. Pistorius hadn't quite met the Olympics qualifying standard in his event, and South Africa hadn't named him an alternate on its 1,600-meter relay team. So Pistorius doesn't get "to pursue his Olympic dream." And "that's a shame," wrote Slezak, "because this young man has done nothing wrong."

The world's full of athletes who have done nothing wrong who don't get to go to the Olympics. Pistorius runs on carbon-fiber blades, which the International Association of Athletics Federations thinks might give him a competitive advantage -- greater stride, less wind resistance, no aching leg muscles. The IAAF said Pistorius couldn't compete but was overruled by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. "Doesn't the IAAF have some drug users to go after?" Slezak wondered. "Track and field should be celebrating Pistorius, not trying to ban him from competition."

Slezak refused to consider the IAAF's point of view, but she got so close to it her nose must have twitched. Observing that Pistorius can now aim for the 2012 Olympics in London, she thought to ask "But what if a newer version of the blades comes out before then? Will the IAAF become more determined than ever to prove they give him a competitive advantage? When the IAAF was considering banning him, it indicated that advancing technology was a concern."

Why shouldn't it be a concern? Especially if it's technology that's available to only one competitor. Let's say Pistorius switches to new blades and immediately becomes the fastest 400-meter runner in the world. Would that development support the IAAF's position, or would it make the IAAF more unforgivable than ever for trying to keep Pistorius from competing? Slezak brushed past the question. "Of course, the technology will continue to evolve," she concluded. "More to the point: Will society keep pace?"

As if a healthy society is one that lets nothing get between it and the next heartwarming story.

The other day Phil Rosenthal imagined that Chicago had a journalism hall of fame, and he stoked the fires by offering dozens of names of past and present greats that he thinks belong in it. I had two immediate reactions. One was to be touched by his column's poignancy. Rosenthal has done a hell of a job as a media writer covering the ongoing downsizing of his own paper, the Tribune, and his proposal struck an elegaic note: let's all declare each other gods while we can and maybe the world won't forget about us quite so quickly. 

The other reaction was to marvel that Rosenthal didn't know Chicago already has a journalism hall of fame. It was founded in 1985 by Jerry Davis and Jerry Field, retiring and incoming presidents of the Chicago Press Club, and though the press club collapsed two years later, the hall of fame survived, being reconstituted eventually under the aegis of the International Press Club of Chicago. The IPCC was founded in 1992 by Field, a longtime publicist, and Arnie Matanky, publisher of the Near North News. Field is a friend; Matanky, who died in 2004, was the most boorish journalist I've ever met.

Rosenthal's column drew a heavy response from readers with their own ideas of media immortality. Unless I missed a reference, none of these readers had any more idea than Rosenthal that they were conjecturing about something that already exists. They should be forgiven. The International Press Club of Chicago seems to consist of whoever shows up for lunch on Wednesdays on the second floor of the Loop's Beef and Brandy Restaurant -- visitors welcome. The IPCC's chief, perhaps only, reason for being is the annual dinner at which the ranks of the hall of fame are swelled by five "living legends" and three dead ones.

You might be thinking, no wonder Rosenthal demands a new hall of fame -- this one won't do. Actually, this one will do fine. Having no other purpose, the IPCC can focus on the question of who the worthiest worthies are, and I will personally vouch for Jerry Field's gravitas whenever he bends to that task. Compare Rosenthal's nominees with the IPCC's inductees -- each list exposes some of the other's egregious oversights, and if the IPCC has been too often swayed by cronyism, so was Rosenthal, I'd say, by sentiment and courtesy. To add my own two cents' worth, any hall of fame that excludes --as both Rosenthal and the IPCC do -- the founders of the Reader, who invented a new business model for urban print journalism that swept the country, and Reader reporter John Conroy cannot possibly be taken seriously.

Of course, I wouldn't take the hall of fame idea seriously regardless. It's a lark, a parlor game, a shuffleboard round robin to bide the time as the Titanic sinks. But calling it what it is, I'm happy to play the game. Anne Keegan has a place in my hall of fame. So does at least one of the founders of the old, trailblazing Chicago Journalism Review, Ron Dorfman. I'll stop now because otherwise I'd be just getting started.

And Phil Rosenthal -- for exceptional coverage of the hardest beat of all, his own house, plus a little balm for the soul. Now I'll stop.

Who's in your Valhalla? 

The screaming headlines in Wednesday's Sun-Times were misleading at best.

Page one: "DREW'S PALS WORE WIRE." On page eight, where the story began, "DREW'S CHILLING 'I SHOULD HAVE HAD THAT B---- CREMATED.'"

The front page was nothing but headlines. "Two of Drew Peterson's closest friends," said the drop head, "recorded months of intimate conversations with him for the State Police."

Smaller headlines at the bottom of the front page announced: "On His Murdered Wife Kathleen: 'I should have had the bitch cremated.'" 

And,

"On the Investigation of Kathleen's Drowning: 'It was in a dry bathtub, what a bunch of idiots.'"

Wow! What else is on the tape? 

Apparently, not even the above.  Read the story. The dry bathtub line is something Peterson's pal Paula Stark says Peterson told her in 2004, when Kathleen Savio, his third wife, was found dead. The should-have-had-her-cremated line is something pal Len Wawczak says he remembers Peterson telling him when authorities decided early last November -- after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared -- to exhume Savio's body. The story indicates that Wawczak and Stark (who are married) started wearing wires later in November.

As far as a reader can tell, reporter Joe Hosey didn't hear the tapes, didn't read a transcript of the tapes, and didn't even confirm there are tapes, those spurious quotations notwithstanding. A token of the Sun-Times's meretriciousness is that despite the paper's ostentatious claims that the story was a "Sun-Times Exclusive," Hosey's a reporter for Joliet's Herald News, a Sun-Times News Group daily that also carried the story. 

Tuesday night a reception was held in the LA Times building for Jim Newton, the departing editor of that paper's editorial page. Told to slash his staff, Newton decided to quit instead. Attending the reception, according to laobserved.com, were the present mayor of Los Angeles,  Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor Richard Riordan, Sheriff Lee Baca, and local billionaire Eli Broad, who'd hoped to buy the Times before the entire Tribune Company was taken over last year by Sam Zell.

Do you think Mayor Daley would show up to say good-bye to Bruce Dold, who runs the Tribune's editorial page? More to the point, what dignitaries would attend a farewell party for reporter Maury Possley, who deserves thanks from a grateful city?

As lists are being drawn up of the dozens of Tribune editorial employees who will soon be tossed over the side to lighten the payroll, Possley has decided to leave voluntarily. This costs the city a terrific investigative reporter who has specialized in prosecutorial misconduct. In a note to his colleagues Monday, Possley wrote that he'll "never forget those moments standing outside a prison and watching inmates go free, knowing that our reporting played some role in exposing their wrongful convictions and securing their freedom. For the past decade, I have had the privilege to work with the since-departed Ken Armstrong and my seemingly constant companion, Steve Mills, on some of the most important journalism in our country."

Possley went on, "It just doesn't seem possible that less than two months ago, some of us gathered at Columbia University for the Pulitzer luncheon with [editor Ann Marie Lipinski] to celebrate our prize for investigative reporting. I understand that there are no guarantees in life -- that God laughs when we say we have plans -- nevertheless, how stunning it is to see the dismantling of our newspaper in such a short time."

(The entire note and other Tribune memos are posted here on Jim Romenesko's forum.)

Dismantled? Some would say "differently mantled." 

The new editor, Gerould Kern, seems fluent in both languages. In a staff memo of his own (it's embedded in the Lee Abrams blog post that follows Possley's farewell note at the above link), Kern declares:

"Courageous public service, credibility, integrity, fairness and accuracy form the foundation of this newspaper. We will stand watch over our country, our city and our communities because this is our special duty and because they demand it of us. You have made this our hallmark."

Kern then segues effortlessly into a tongue that few old-fashioned journalists have begun to master. He continues: "But the economics that have supported our newspaper for decades are in disarray. I do not have to tell you how significantly this affects the newsroom. Still, amid the dislocation and uncertainty lies an opportunity we can seize. We can transform into a news organization that is ideally suited for a new century defined by breathtaking technological innovation and a voracious appetite for specialized information delivered over multiple digital and print channels."

No matter how voracious the new Tribune's appetite for "specialized information delivered over multiple digital and print channels" turns out to be, I doubt the state's attorney's office will find the new Tribune more of a load than having Possley around.

Here's a brief Reuters interview with Gerould Kern, the new editor of the diminishing Chicago Tribune. Addressing the upcoming round of job cuts, Kern allows that the Trib will have to do more (it sounds like a lot more) with less, but if it's on its toes should be able to do a "fabulous job."

And he protests the rap he's gotten for promoting the byline count as a measure of productivity among Tribune Company reporters. "Just one data point," he says, "and, frankly, probably not the most valuable."

Chauvinistic beer drinkers probably think they know this much about the latest front-page international takeover: tiny Belgium now controls Saint Louis's mighty Anheuser-Busch.

"Anger and Dismay at the Sale of a City Treasure," said the New York Times headline Thursday, over a story reporting that "in the end, sentiment and tradition were no match for a $52 billion offer from the Belgian beer giant InBev."

Earlier, an AP story out of Saint Louis announced that "the King of Beers . . . is being swallowed by a Belgian brewer known for its frugality." The Chicago Tribune reported Saint Louisans nervously wondering "what changes the sale of the company to Belgian brewer InBev will bring." The Toronto Star described InBev as a "sleepy Belgian brewer until it bought Canada's John Labatt Ltd. in the mid-1990s and went on a takeover tear, snapping up Bass, Beck's and the largest Brazilian brewer."

The Star got it wrong. Labatt was bought up in 1995 by the Belgian Brewer Interbrew. InBev didn't even exist then. It was formed in 2004 when Interbrew merged with that "largest Brazilian brewer," AmBev. Interbrew hardly snapped it up. InBev's corporate headquarters remained in Belgium but corporate power shifted to Brazil. And Labatt was quick to see the difference -- its Toronto plant was soon shut down. Brazilians dominate InBev's executive board of management and Brazilian investment bankers are InBev's major individual shareholders. They and the Brazilian CEO, Carlos Brito, who drove the Anheuser-Busch deal, have set the corporate culture, one said to be marked by ruthless cost cutting and a boundless appetite for mergers and acquisitions. 

We can leave Belgium out of it. 

American beer drinkers deserve to know who their colonizers are.

The debate is raging over this week's notorious New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama, but here in Chicago we've been there, done that. There's a world of difference between Barry Blitt's drawing of the up-and-comers in Islamic and revolutionary regalia and Mirth and Girth, David K. Nelson's 1988 acrylic painting of Harold Washington in a woman's undergarments: Blitt's trying to ridicule Barack Obama's more rabid opponents, while Nelson was trying to knock the recently deceased mayor's more rabid glorifiers. 

But their works have this much in common. They've made people furious. And each works better as an idea than as an executed picture. As Clarence Page said in the Tribune Wednesday about Blitt's cover -- "When it takes you too long to figure out whether a joke is funny, well, forget about it." I've never been able to persuade myself that Nelson's painting wasn't dumb (I've tried), and I'm still looking for ways to decide that Blitt's is witty.

The David K. Nelson controversy was a major chapter in our city's hysteria-packed history, an episode that began with black aldermen under police escort commandeering a painting from the School of the Art Institute and ended six years later with a withering decision in U.S. Appellate Court and an out-of-court settlement to Nelson. In his 1994 opinion Judge Richard Posner noted that after a day in police custody the painting was released to Nelson, "we assume on its own recognizance."

Mirth and Girth wasn't the last time David K. Nelson stirred up trouble in Chicago. In 1991 he made a cartoon for the Reader's year-in-review issue that was pretty funny. It showed Alderman Dorothy Tillman as a paper doll in skivvies trying to decide what to wear, a "feminine yet subtly persuasive" outfit accessorized by a revolver or something a little more rugged accessorized by a submachine gun and matching ammo-clip bandolier. (Tillman had reportedly waved a gun at a community meeting.) "Help Dress Dorothy," we called the cartoon.

To make a long story short, here's the column I wrote three weeks later, after the chairman of the state Democratic Party had urged his party's candidates not to advertise in this newspaper. And here's my column the week after that, meditating on the demonstration against the Reader that I'd watched from an office window.

Ann Marie Lipinski picked an odd time to quit her job as editor of the Chicago Tribune. Wheels were in motion -- she'd just launched a crash project to redesign and shrink the physical paper and also shrink its staff. Committees were meeting for hours a day about the first and editors were working out guidelines for the second. Now what? Has all that work been wasted? Gerould Kern, who takes over Friday, surely has his own ideas about how to cut, and onlookers who applaud Lipinski's news values must fear that Kern's ideas won't be as good. (He was, apparently, the guy in corporate who came up with the daffy idea of counting bylines to judge the value of staff.)

I've just been listening to someone inside the Tribune who's trying to think it through. (This person's years and experience add up to a perspective I've learned to respect and trust.) Lipinski had been editor seven years already, and Sam Zell and his cowboys were obviously not her style; if she thought of herself as a short-timer why put herself through the agony of deciding who stays and who goes? Yes, but who knows better than she does who's dispensable and who isn't, and who better to defend the Tribune's highest values than someone who's spent a career serving them?

Lipinski came back from a week's vacation in Korea with her husband and daughter with her head clear and her mind made up. It was time. She told her bosses last week, her top editors Sunday night, and her staff Monday. She works through Thursday and the farewell party's that evening at the Billy Goat.

But why did she take a vacation in the first place, while everyone around her was working overtime trying to reinvent the paper? This strikes my interlocutor as oddly insensitive. Lipinski had her friends at the Tribune, the celebrated Friends of Ann Marie -- or FOAMs -- but otherwise, this person says, she was not an impassioning leader. In recent months she'd been no Henry V -- or John Carroll or Dean Baquet, fallen leaders at the LA Times remembered for rallying the troops against the barbarians.

Of course, she's entitled to her own style. And those paladins in Los Angeles could make a strong case that they were right and the bean-counting bosses back in the Tribune Tower were wrong. But now Sam Zell and his crowd have swept those bean counters aside, and it's a lot easier to say the new crowd's arrogant and boorish than to say it's wrong. Plenty of staffers in the Tribune newsroom who'd lay down their lives for the traditional news values Lipinski represents think of Zell, nevertheless, as the paper's only hope of staying afloat.

So what was Lipinski supposed to rally the troops against? Well, against their deepening foreboding, the fear that things can only get worse. And inspiration wasn't her style. Which may be why the newsroom seemed oddly unemotional, I was told, after Lipinski made her announcement, even if the staff universally felt regret. Fearing the Goths in the hearth, it appears they'll miss what she stood for more than they'll miss her. 

As for Kern, he lost a battle for managing editor to Jim O'Shea after Lipinski moved up to editor, and thereafter moved out of the newsroom and up to corporate. There are surely editorial staffers hired in the past five years or so who have never heard of him. But out of editorial's eyes, he was in Zell's. It's curious the bosses could settle on  him so quickly -- they didn't even make him acting editor while they conducted a more careful search. Maybe Lipinski's resignation wasn't such a surprise.

I called William Gaines this morning and asked for his thoughts. A longtime Tribune investigative reporter, Gaines later taught journalism at the University of Illinois before retiring a year ago and moving back to Munster, Indiana. The Tribune's months-long investigation of City Council corruption in 1987 earned Gaines his second Pulitzer. He shared the award with two other Tribune reporters, Ann Marie Lipinski and Dean Baquet.

Baquet wound up at the LA Times. He became editor in 2005 when John Carroll, his predecessor, quit to protest staff cuts demanded of him, and the next year Baquet refused to make more cuts and was fired. (The publisher who fired him, David Hiller, fell out of favor with Zell and the other new bosses in Chicago and resigned Monday. That development was completely overshadowed here by Lipinski's resignation.)

Thinking about 1988 reminded Gaines of Ellen Soeteber, who was the Pulitzer-winning team's metro editor. Soeteber later moved on to become editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  That paper was sold in 2005, and the new owners decided to cut the staff. So Soeteber quit.

And Gaines remembered Jim O'Shea. He was Lipinski's deputy ME at the time of the Jelly Roll Morton project, and he and Gaines worked on several stories together. "It’s a passing era, I think," Gaines reflected. "Over the years we had a certain type of journalism I don’t think anybody else was able to match. It seemed like we could take on any challenge."

O'Shea was the Tribune's managing editor when the Tower sent him to LA to replace Baquet. Coldly greeted at first, O'Shea wound up resigning early this year after fighting with Hiller over staff cuts. 

And now we have Lipinski's inscrutable resignation. 

Are there enough swords to supply all the editors falling on them? Are we seeing the birth of a proud new tradition? 

Ann Marie Lipinski resigned Monday after seven years as editor of the Tribune. She's being replaced by Gerould Kern, vice president of editorial for the Tribune Company's Tribune Publishing subsidiary.

Lipinski said she's no longer a good fit for the job. She'd held the job of editor about as long as most of that paper's editors do, if not longer, but her sudden resignation, with the Tribune in flux and jobs being slashed, is troubling. Like most Tribune editors--but unlike Kern, who joined the Tribune from the Daily Herald as an editor in 1991--Lipinski came up through the paper's newsroom ranks; in 1988 she won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. And, in my perception at least, she championed the meticulous coverage of serious matters as journalism's supreme virtue. 

David Maraniss has just published a book called Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World.  Please!

According to the reviewer in Sunday's New York Times, Maraniss ties the 1960 games in with the cold war and points out they were also the first Olympics shown on TV. But the reviewer, David Margolick, thinks that if the 60 Olympics had actually changed the world Maraniss wouldn't have had to write a book telling us what happened there.

For a forgotten Olympic Games that truly were of singular importance, I refer you to the research of my friend A.E. Eyre, which I discussed in a 2003 Hot Type. Eyre makes an irrefutable case that the oft-maligned 1904 games in Saint Louis (my hometown) were actually The Games That Made America. Because 533 of the 625 competitors were Americans, who won 238 of the 282 medals, the rest of the world ridiculed the Saint Louis games as meaningless. That's when, according to Eyre, America realized that it didn't care what the rest of the world thinks and that if the rest of the world didn't even show up that was fine with America. Ninety-nine years later America invaded Iraq. Coincidence? Eyre doesn't think so.

The highlight of the 1904 games was the marathon, whose winner, it turned out, rode 11 of the 26 miles in an automobile. Ninety-four years later Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs as a Saint Louis Cardinal. Again: coincidence?

The Rome games got caught up in the cold war because, says Margolick, "the Soviets, who had disparaged Olympics early on as capitalist circuses, had learned from Hitler that they were in fact great sources of propaganda, and depicted their every success as proof of their supremacy."  

This points to the book Maraniss might have written. The Soviets won more medals in Rome than the Americans, so I guess they won that propaganda battle. So what? The cold war's long over and what good did Rome do them? For that matter, what good did the '36 games in Berlin do Hitler? Was there a single nation in Europe that thought, "Wow! Those Germans are something. Can't wait till they get here."

I don't know. I'm asking for someone like Maraniss to do some research and tell us how much propaganda actually matters. It's an important question because the next Olympics are only weeks away, and the Chinese idea all along has been to use the games to score a major PR triumph. "Indeed," writes Andrew J. Nathan in The New Republic, "the Beijing Olympics mark the full mastery of marketing techniques by Chinese bureaucrats."

The empirical evidence, as I understand it, is that propaganda is most effective at clouding the thinking of the propagandizer. Berlin intoxicated Hitler. The U.S. preaches that it's the land of liberty and the greatest country in the world, and no people on earth are as persuaded as Americans. Detroit advertised itself for decades as the builder of automobiles that couldn't be beat, and when imports from Japan began beating them hands down consumers reacted a lot quicker than Detroit did.

When drunks brag in bars, they make a lot of sense to themselves.

The backs of ID badges (left) at the Tribune used to reinforce the seven traditional "Tribune values."

But there's a new sheriff in town with a new message. The image on the right is the back of the badges being issued as of this week.

That A.F.D.I. was a Sam Zellish touch. But innovation czar Lee Abrams has put out the word that around the Tribune it will stand for "Actually Already Always Friggin' Do It," in deference to sensibilities struggling to get with the times.

UPDATE:  For a nifty comment on these badges, see Whet Moser's blog on this site. "Sam Zell Jr." is of course correct [see argument below] isn't right either. It's "actually," as I knew in the first place although you wouldn't think so. As for the seven values, hmm, well, has anyone counted the Big 10 lately? Funny, but in its extemis, the Tribune is preoccupied with those values no longer worn over the heart -- at least some of them, such as Customer Satisfaction (or the lack of), Employee Involvement, Financial Strength (or the loss of), Innovation, and Teamwork. Go team.

Colin McMahon tells me he has "about ten different options" on his desk, each a way of transforming the Saturday Tribune. "We are looking at a way to address the fact that Saturday is a different day for our readers," says McMahon, "different from a midweek day and different from a Sunday."

McMahon edits the Tribune's Perspective section and he's a head of the committee assigned to reinvent the Saturday paper, which is one of several committees created to reimagine the Tribune from top to bottom. We're supposed to see this leaner, hungrier newspaper in September, but McMahon's work will be done a lot sooner. The end of the month? I asked, for I'd heard the new Saturday Tribune would be rolled out by then. "That might be a little ambitious," he said, "but not far off."

If any of those ten options is chosen -- "and they may not," he added -- "the Saturday paper will look significantly different from the Monday and Tuesday papers." It'll be a little closer to the editions later in the week because those are larded with info on how-to-do and what-to-do, which McMahon says should be the strength of the Saturday edition too. "Saturday is not a restful day for many people," he said. "If they're not going to religious services they're running around going to soccer games and Home Depot. They want a quicker take, a little help in how to live their lives." Some of the ideas, he said, call for a front page with a smaller story count, a front page that looks ahead to what's going to happen rather than back at what has, and inside "a lot more utility" -- a "distillation" of the week's news, a beefed-up roundup of "movies, food, and entertainment options."

McMahon says that because Saturday readers are almost all seven-day subscribers, they tend to be "committed Tribune readers" who might be unsettled by change. On the other hand, the Saturday paper is the thinnest, least-read edition of the week, so "on balance, it's a good day to try some things." One thing the Tribune might want to try, I suggested, would be to drop the Saturday paper entirely and make do with a massive weekend edition, as papers do in other countries. After all, the Sunday Tribune hits the stands around ten o'clock Saturday morning. "There's 5,000 things being discussed," McMahon replied. "That's one of them. But for readership and economic reasons -- I don't see that on the horizon."

The fate of Perspective isn't in McMahon's hands, but I wondered if it would survive the Tribune's retrenchment. "I think there will be Perspective-type copy in the Sunday paper after the changes," he said. "I don’t know if it’ll be exactly the same as it is now.”

The Tribune has 578 positions on its editorial staff, and roughly 80 of them -- 14 percent of the staff -- will disappear by the end of August. The staff got the word Tuesday afternoon. Twenty of the positions are vacant and will simply be eliminated, but the rest will mean cutting people.

It's this way and worse throughout the Tribune Company. Last week the LA Times announced it was cutting 150 editorial positions, 17 percent of its staff. Earlier the Hartford Courant said it would eliminate 57 editorial jobs, or 25 percent of the staff, and the Baltimore Sun that it would get rid of about 60 -- that's 20 percent of the staff.

It's not a case of strapped papers boasting they'll do more with less. The Tribune Company papers intend to do less with less -- they're all shrinking their news holes to try to bring costs and revenues into balance.  A task force of about 30 Tribune staffers is now meeting daily to overhaul the paper, and we'll see the results in September. The same thing is going on at the other papers.

After the Courant's cuts were announced, managing editor Barbara Roessner wrote a letter to readers that began, "It's been a hellish week. . . . Man, when the company tells us we've got to cut our staff and newsprint by 25 percent just to stay in business, it's scary."  Roessner said she and her staff were trying to figure out "how to pack a smaller newspaper with such interesting, important, necessary news and information that you'll have to keep reading. You may even enjoy it, relish it, lunge for it."

Or, she went on, "I may soon be tending bar in Vermont. We'll see."

I hope I sounded properly enthusiastic last October writing about Pro Publica, a newsroom of investigative reporters sponsored by a California philanthropy. But I had qualms. "Pro Publica believes it will be the 'largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States,'" I wrote. "Even so, a bureau of 24 reporters and editors can't begin to meet the national need. Furthermore, a team of journalists all based in Manhattan . . . won't have its ear to the streets of Topeka." Pro Publica had announced that it intended to work on stories of national scope, "truly important stories . . . with moral force." This grandiosity suggested that Pro Publica wouldn't be looking where the need was greatest, to the middle markets whose papers were pulling in their investigative horns, thereby giving a pass, I said, to "corruption in the local city hall and assessor's office."

Now Pro Publica's up to a staff of 28 (two Pulitzer winners from the LA Times have just agreed to sign on), and on Monday, Edward Wasserman of the Miami Herald judged it on its first big story. He was properly enthusiastic -- he called Pro Publica a "dazzling new investigative reporting outfit" that had just collaborated with 60 Minutes on a "scathing examination" of al-Hurra" -- the badly managed and little-watched news network the Bush administration set up in Virginia at a cost of $100 million a year to broadcast in Arabic to the Middle East. But Wasserman had qualms. "Why was Pro Publica using its philanthropic funding to, essentially, subsidize the cost of a segment for 60 Minutes, the most financially successful news show in the history of U.S. television? And how could Pro Publica claim to be filling a void when the Washington Post broke its own story on al-Hurra the same day (June 22)? 

Finally, Wasserman suggested the way Pro Publica was spending its $10 million a year from the Sadler Foundation is beside the point. "What's vanishing," he wrote, "is that vast mid-range of solid, investigative sleuthing that used to be integral to the work of the country's better local and regional newspapers -- the stories of judicial corruption, cronyism, crooked zoning, crummy schools, contracting scams. . ."

"Increasingly, nobody's doing those stories," Wasserman went on, "and the next wave of nonprofit funding should go to creating positions in regional newsrooms for reporters who will."

When I called general manager Richard Tofel Monday morning for his reaction to Wasserman's piece, it turned out that he'd already talked to him and responded with a letter to Jim Romenesko's Media News Web site. "Our aim is to provide stories of force and value to readers," Tofel wrote. "For that reason, and to the extent we have a choice of publishing partners for our major stories, we select them with an eye toward maximizing the stories' impact. With this in mind, we were delighted to work with 60 Minutes."

To me Tofel said, "The fact that one of these great and still economically powerful news organizations could do any investigative story, which they could, does not seem to me to prove that they would or will do all possible investigative stories worth doing."  In other words, 60 Minutes might have the wherewithal to do a report on al-Hurra, but  the report happened because Pro Publica advocated for it and did the reporting. If Pro Publica believes in the stories it's breaking, it has no reason to apologize for finding partners who will bring them to the widest possible audiences.

As for the Washington Post, "For us, the fact the Washington Post was on the same story the same week is really a good thing. One reason is that we're not looking to sell advertising or circulation. We're looking to make a difference about al-Hurra. If by the end of the day we're the only ones covering it we're in trouble. If you're going to have impact, other people are going to notice."

In his critique Wasserman said he fears that "structural problems in Pro Publica's organizational model [might] keep it from sparking the transformation U.S. journalism needs." That's a lot to ask of anybody and more than Pro Publica ever promised, but when it was new it did claim to be responding to a moment in history "when new models are necessary to carry forward some of the great work of journalism in the public interest that is such an integral part of self-government, and thus an important bulwark of our democracy." No wonder Wasserman didn't cut Pro Publica any slack. In his letter to Romenesko, Tofel asked for reasonable expectations. "Shoring up the economics of . . . metro papers, or any other news business, is beyond our ability," he said.

The Supreme Court celebrated Independence Day a few days early by unshackling the Second Amendment, declaring the freedom of Americans to defend our lives, liberty, and property by keeping guns at home. Anyone who, like me, was viscerally dismayed by the 5-4 Roberts bloc (therefore doubly suspect) ruling, written by Justice Scalia (therefore triply suspect), could take comfort in critiques that emotionally dismissed it as "wrongheaded and dangerous" or coolly dissected it as ahistorically reasoned.

But what worked for me was a stiff dose of libertarianism. It's not necessary to agree with libertarians to appreciate the therapeutic value of their often contrarian perspective. So first I read the Tribune's Steve Chapman, one of my favorite pundits, who said the thing is, gun control hasn't worked, and who explained why Thomas Jefferson is smiling tonight. Then I moved on to reason.com, where the more doctrinaire Radley Balko mourned a "hollow" victory. Balko complained that Scalia's opinion was laced with "caveats, exceptions, and asides" and was so narrowly focused that "for practical purposes, the only people directly affected by the ruling are the 600,000 residents of Washington, D.C., and the handful of others living in protectorates of the federal government."

Balko was a tonic. In his grumpy, disapproving way, he reminded me that a constitutional freedom is a freedom our courts and our legislatures are under no obligation to regard as absolute. If it's wrong to shout fire in a crowded theater, it can remain wrong to sport a firearm there. No, despite the headline over the dismayed editorial in the New York Times, Scalia had not just told America to "lock and load."

Like Chapman, but giddily, Balko bolstered his argument by invoking Jefferson. Wishing Scalia had taken the opportunity to plug the 2nd Amendment "as a bulwark against government tyranny," Balko said the threat is real: "One needn't be a modern-day mountain militiaman to observe that authoritarian regimes often become tyrannical after first disarming the citizenry. As Thomas Jefferson put it, 'When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.'"

It should be half that simple. Sometimes when the government fears the people there is Zimbabwe.

In a world swirling with danger and treachery, there's one thing Americans have always been able to count on -- the inferiority complex of our diffident neighbors to the north. The best Canadians have been able to do about it is tell themselves from time to time that they're somehow worthier than we are, if vastly less significant -- and they set great store by trifling evidence, such as the recent survey that reports Canada is a considerably happier country than the U.S. Well of course it is -- all the U.S. guarantees is the pursuit of happiness, and the fun's in the chase.

But the tide has turned. I was just in Canada (where I lived for a time as a boy), and came across a troubling cover story in Maclean's, the major national magazine up there. July 1 is Canada's "Canada Day" (sorta like our Independence Day but minus a war of independence), and Maclean's cover story took the familiar tack of thinking about Canadians in terms of Americans. What was new to me was the attitude!

The headline to this 12-page report: "How Canada Stole the American Dream. The numbers are in. Compared to the U.S., we work less, live longer, enjoy better health and have more sex. And get this: now we're wealthier too."

More money! More sex! They're beating us at our own games. I carefully studied the Maclean's report for the usual note of apology, the passage where the Canadian reporter allows that the numbers are subject to varying interpretations and, besides, Americans would be living like kings if they didn't spend so many billions defending shirkers like us and the rest of the free world. There was no such passage. In fact, Canadians aren't feeling like shirkers these days. Their soldiers have shed gallons of blood in Afghanistan, and when their lionized commander took over the army five years ago he said, "“We are not the public service of Canada. We are not just another department. We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people.”

That's how American generals used to talk.

My theory is this all began with the Conrad Black trial here in Chicago. The discovery that Canada could turn out a white-collar crook who impressed even Americans was a revelation in Canada, and those people have felt ten feet tall ever since. 

Before resuming my media patrol after ten days in the northwest, I want to say a word about the mode of transportation that got me there and brought me back. Flying has changed. Perhaps influenced by my choice of reading material on this holiday, Camus' The Plague, I observed that flying has become a collective misery so extreme that a collective human decency is emerging in response. Passengers are doomed to suffer, and no one -- not the pilots, nor the flight attendants, nor the check-in clerks -- can do anything about it, but they let us know that they care and that they'll be suffering right alongside us. Our haggard flight attendants, for instance, didn't pretend that the cheese snack packs they offered for $4 a pop (but in limited supply) were nourishing, or tasty, or anything but a humiliation. And as the night flight to Chicago left the Dallas airport (let's not get into why it was necessary to fly to Vancouver by way of Dallas), one flight attendant got on the PA and admitted to the whole plane that some passengers had been asking about blankets but there were no blankets.

Flying coach is like sailing steerage. It's like catching the bus, except that to ride the bus you don't have to plod through a security check in stockinged feet. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. What seems new is the way everyone feels everyone else's sadness. The pilot of the flight from Vancouver to Dallas made no attempt to gild the lily when he got on the speaker and explained that the reason we were all standing, carry-on bags in hand, in a darkened plane whose door did not open was that a new automated system had failed and as a result our 757 had taxied into a gate configured for a 737.

As a result of this delay, even though my galloping wife and I managed to arrive in time at our connecting flight in another terminal, our luggage did not. Three hours later, well past midnight, we were standing in a long line on O'Hare's lower level waiting to report the missing suitcases. The three clerks tending to this line could not have been more patient and concerned. The details that had to be exchanged about the contents of these suitcases and when and if we might see them again could be hard to hear -- a woman who'd gotten off a plane from Colombia and discovered that an expensive guitar and all of her family's clothing had mysteriously disappeared was standing nearby screaming profanely. But her frustration was understandable, and I could feel the clerks' compassion.